Vancouver Winter Olympics: A festival of corporate greed

Graphic from No2010.com.

By Roger Annis

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – Socialist Voice – On February 12, 2010, the corporate sporting behemoth known as the 21st Winter Olympic Games will open to great fanfare here. In a time of economic hardship and government cuts to social programs across Canada, huge sums of public money have been spent to stage this uber spectacle.

Billions of dollars have been spent constructing venues, a new convention centre and airport terminal; widening and paving untold kilometres of roads and highways; building a hugely expensive rapid transit line connecting the city’s airport to its downtown; and erecting new hotels to serve the influx of corporate sponsors and spectators.

The hotel, travel, restaurant and real estate industries hope to make a killing off the influx of out-of-town spectators and partygoers. Construction companies have already earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the years of preparation furiously pouring concrete and asphalt. The official line says there will also be lots of long-term tourism dollars to be made, though this has not happened in other host cities.

Some of the world’s largest corporations are games sponsors, including Coca-Cola, VISA, General Electric, Samsung and McDonald’s. Canadian sponsors include the Royal Bank, Petro Canada, Hudson’s Bay Company and Bell. The scale of their participation during the two weeks of competition is such that they have booked entire hotels and restaurants to cater to their executives, invited guests and assorted hangers-on.

Militarisation and clampdown on democratic rights

When Vancouver first submitted a bid for the Winter Olympics, the budget for “security” was said to be C$175 million. The final cost will exceed $1 billion. An army of Canadian military, federal police agencies and municipal police, about 10,000 altogether, will police the city, complemented by some 5000 security guards.

A vast network of surveillance cameras of public spaces has been installed, and barbed wire fences and other barriers are going up all over the region to keep protesters and the non-ticket holding public away from games venues. Police have stepped up harassment and intimidation of anti-Olympics organisers across Canada, in some cases visiting homes and workplaces to interrogate not only games’ critics but also their acquaintances.

The rationale for the overwhelming display of military and police power is the same as that used to justify the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine – that behind every corner lurks a potential “terrorist threat” and the only way to combat that threat is to wage war. Police have warned they will arrest anyone who attempts to stage protests near games venues or along key transportation routes.

The Vancouver police have acquired new weapons to deal with critics, including the Long Range Acoustical Device, a loudspeaker system first deployed against civilians in Pittsburgh last year during the G20 meeting of world political leaders. It emits a powerful sonic wave to disperse crowds. Transit police, meanwhile, will for the first time introduce dogs into the transit system to randomly sniff passengers and their belongings.

Two special laws have been adopted by the provincial government that, in cooperation with Vancouver’s city council, will “clean up” the city and curtail visible expressions of opposition to the games.

The Assistance to Shelter Act (termed the “Olympics Kidnapping Act” by housing rights advocates) permits police to remove the homeless or other “undesirables” from streets surrounding Olympic venues and dump them at housing shelters or in other municipalities.

Bill 13 regulates public signage. It is designed to protect the Olympic trademark and those of games sponsors, but critics say it will also be used to censor public expressions of opposition to the games. At the University of British Columbia, for example, students in residence have been threatened with eviction if they post anti-Olympic signs in their windows. In mid-December, Vancouver city officials ordered the removal of a mural painted on the outside wall of an art gallery in downtown Vancouver – four sad faces and one happy face drawn inside the Olympics rings.

Police have refused to say whether police infiltrators will join protests and promote violence. The issue is not a small one. At a protest of world leaders in Montebello, Quebec, near Ottawa, in 2007, infiltrators from the Quebec provincial police urged protesters to throw rocks and incited other forms of violence.

One police infiltration has already come to light. When the Olympic torch arrived in Victoria, BC, on October 30 to commence its cross-Canada relay spectacle, hundreds of people staged a protest drawing attention to the contrast between lavish public spending on the Olympic Games and miserly funding of social programs. Protesters blocked the relay for a time using civil-disobedience tactics. Unknown persons used marbles to disrupt and potentially injure mounted police and their horses being used for crowd control, an action that protest organisers say did not come from their ranks.

One month later in Vancouver, the chief of Victoria police, James Graham, said his force had infiltrated the protest. He told an amused international security conference, “You knew that the protesters weren’t that organised when on the ferry on the way over (from Vancouver) they rented a bus … and there was a cop driving the bus.”

Garth Mullins, an organiser with the Olympic Resistance Network, told a public meeting in Vancouver in late November, “If there is violence at the Olympics, it’s going to be started by the police.” Seated as a panelist at the meeting was Bud Mercer, the head of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit.

Border controls

Stiffer controls at the nearby US-Canada border are restricting the movements of possible games critics. On November 25, 2009, respected US journalist Amy Goodman, host of the daily Democracy Now! radio program, was detained for several hours by Canadian border officials while on her way to a speaking engagement in Vancouver. Although the Olympics was not the subject of her talk, officials were worried it might be. They grilled her about it for several hours. Eventually, she was allowed to continue her travel, but was ordered to leave the country within 48 hours.

On December 10, 2009, Marla Renn, an organiser with the Olympic Resistance Network in Vancouver and a chairperson of the Stopwar.ca coalition, was refused entry into the United States while on her way to Olympics-related speaking engagements in Portland, Oregon. She was searched, photographed, fingerprinted and grilled for six hours about her political views and her contacts in the United States. Her cell phone was taken and accessed, and her books and speaking notes were read and copied.

After that interrogation, she was delivered to Canadian authorities who subjected her to their own interrogation for several more hours. US authorities ordered her not to return to the United States under threat of detention.

In an account of her treatment published in the weekly Georgia Straight, Renn wrote:

My refused entry to the U.S., accompanied by interrogation, intimidation, and harassment by officials on both sides of the border, demonstrated once again how $1 billion in Olympic security is designed to stifle dissent, even the public-speaking variety, and not to ensure public safety as is officially claimed.

Concern about the conduct of the Olympics security force is especially warranted because of the epidemic of police violence sweeping Canada in recent years. Tasers have caused dozens of deaths at police hands, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) killing of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport in October 2007 that was captured on amateur video and broadcast around the world.

Deaths by police gunshot and common assault by police are on the rise. In British Columbia alone there were 960 formal complaints of police misconduct in 2009.

Meanwhile, the weak and ineffective RCMP Public Complaints Commission was effectively shut down by the federal government on December 31, 2009, when the four-year term of chair Paul Kennedy ended. His appointment was not renewed nor has a replacement been named. Kennedy recently issued a report highly critical of the RCMP’s conduct in the killing of Dziekanski.

War games

Olympic games have always been a showcase for the militarism of host countries. The Canadian Armed Forces, now engaged in a ruthless and predatory war in Afghanistan, is prominently featured in the preparations of these games. Its vehicles routinely accompany the Olympic torch relay as it winds its way across Canada. Soldiers will be on the streets of Vancouver throughout the competition. Helicopters and aircraft fighters have been practicing “security” missions in the skies above the city for months. It is rumoured that the opening ceremonies will pay tribute to Canada’s war in Afghanistan.

By tradition, host countries of the Olympic Games issue calls for cessation of military hostilities and promotion of the “ideals of peace” for the duration of the event. A resolution to this effect was introduced by Canada to the United Nations and approved on October 19, 2009 – but the government of Canada has made no commitment to observe a truce in Afghanistan in February.

Social housing a victim of the games

Vancouver’s controversial bid for the Winter Olympics was launched in 1999 by a provincial New Democratic Party government and a federal Liberal Party government. To sell the bid to a wary population, the games were dressed up as a socially responsible event that would improve the city’s sporting facilities, build new modes of public transport, employ “green” construction techniques and, above all, expand the stock of social housing.

Metropolitan Vancouver has a chronic housing crisis that sees thousands of people living without a roof over their heads and thousands more living in precarious or squalid conditions. The city has the highest cost of housing and shelter in Canada. The first and foremost concern about these games was always that poor people living in rooming houses would be evicted by landlords intent on sprucing up their facilities and renting them to games visitors at inflated prices. A related concern was the expenditure of vast sums of public funds on a sporting event instead of social needs.

A pall of uncertainty hung over the bid even after it was awarded in the summer of 2003. The uncertainty was only lifted after deft maneuvreing by municipal politicians in the months that followed. Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell (since appointed to the federal senate) blocked with two right-wing counsellors of the conservative NPA party and three counsellors of the progressive COPE party to hold a non-binding plebiscite on the games. The yes side won 64 per cent – but only 46 per cent of eligible voters took part and voting was restricted to the City of Vancouver, ignoring the wider metropolitan region, let alone the province.

The yes side enjoyed the endorsement of the opposition New Democratic Party and most of its trade union affiliates. Proponents of the Winter Olympic Games within the labour and social rights movements argued that support could “leverage” promises from the provincial and federal governments for increased social spending. Yet once the plebiscite was in the bag, the vague promises by governments to build housing for Vancouver’s poor and homeless population were tossed aside.

The last in a string of abandoned housing promises was the decision in early 2009 by a new city administration (composed in its majority of a right-wing split from COPE) to cancel the social housing content of the athletes’ village, now deemed too expensive. The village, located in downtown Vancouver, will instead be converted to luxury condominiums after the games. (A remnant of social housing in the form of subsidised rents for some units is still being debated.)

Outrageously, the village then required a half billion financing guarantee from the City of Vancouver before it could be completed. Fortress Investment Group of New York refused to continue its financing for the project, a consequence of US financial collapse.

The onset of the economic crisis in September 2008 triggered a new wave of cuts to social programs by the provincial government (see Socialist Voice, October 5, 2009). This is the main reason why public support to the games in the host province has been steadily declining.

Public transport: Another victim of broken Olympics promises

Another victim of broken games promises is public transport. Most local politicians and transit experts agree that public transport priorities are a rapid service to the northeast of the city, creation of rail service to suburbs in the Fraser River Valley and substantial expansion of bus services. However, Olympic priorities dictated construction of a rapid transit line connecting the downtown to the airport, at a cost of $2 billion, or $110 million per kilometre. Vancouver’s transit authority, Translink, says the Canada Line and other road and highway expansion has exhausted funds for any new public transport projects. Meanwhile fares continue to rise. They have risen 40 per cent in the past eight years.

In November 2009, chief executive officer of Translink Thomas Prendergast abruptly resigned after 15 months on the job. He gave no explanation for the decision but Gordon Price, a respected transportation planner and writer, commented that Prendergast “looked at the situation, saw this wasn’t going anywhere and said ‘What am I doing here?’”

Price summed up the Vancouver region’s transportation policy in a commentary in the November 13, 2009, Vancouver Sun, “We’re going full speed ahead, backwards. To the world of the 1950s and '60s, when we assumed that we would be driving everywhere for everything, and went out and built it that way. Now, in most of the region, we’re doing it again.”

Protests planned

Despite all the threats and obstacles, protests against the Olympic Games and its scandalous public funding have begun and will continue throughout.

The Olympic torch relay has met protests in many towns and cities across the country. A key theme of protests have been the deplorable conditions and ongoing violations of the rights of Canada’s Indigenous population, including those living in urban areas. The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) launched its work in Vancouver several years ago under the theme “No Olympics on Stolen Indian Land” to highlight the fact that much of the land on which the games will take place is unceded Indigenous territory.

One torch relay protest in Nairn Center, northern Ontario, blockaded the Trans Canada Highway on January 2, 2010, as the torch procession approached. Eight young people were arrested and then later released. One of them, Mark Corbiere from the Anishinabe people, stated in an ORN press release:

VANOC [the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee] and the government of Canada can no longer whitewash Canada’s brutal legacy of ongoing colonialism, nor its abysmal environmental record; these are the things Canada and VANOC really represent, and we will not let them use the Olympic spotlight to put their lies unchallenged before the global public.

A demonstration will take place in Vancouver to coincide with the opening of the games on February 12. It is being organised by the 2010 Welcoming Committee and its sponsoring and participating organisations, including the ORN. Scores of public information and protest meetings and rallies have been held in the months leading up to the games.

The BC Civil Liberties Association has played a leading role in drawing attention to the violations of civil rights accompanying the Winter Olympics. It is organising teams of legal observers who will observe political protests as well as other places and events that might experience police misconduct.

One event to take place on February 14 is shaping up as a confrontation with Olympics officials. It is an annual march through the streets of Vancouver to commemorate the scores of Aboriginal women who have disappeared over the past decades in Canada and are presumed to have met violent deaths. The traditional march route overlaps Olympic no-go zones. March organisers say they will not change the traditional route to meet the whims of Olympic officials.

The two-week Olympic spectacle will leave in its wake a legacy of financial debt, deepening impoverishment, violations of civil and social rights, and a significant reinforcement of the tools and weapons of the national security state. What’s more, five weeks before the games’ opening came news of yet another Olympic spending boondoggle in the making – Intrawest Corporation, the owner of the Whistler ski resort where most of the games’ downhill events will take place, located 100 kilometres north of Vancouver, is in financial default and may require hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency bailout.

Such a legacy deserves to be challenged.

More Socialist Voice coverage of the Olympics

  • OLYMPIC FLAME PARADES THROUGH RAVAGED NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA

    http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=988

    “The first protest in the province to greet the torch relay occurred when scores of parents and students brought their concerns over school closings to its route through the city.”

  • OTTAWA CITIZEN SMEARS PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS

    http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=820

    "The page 3 article aims to promote fear of possible protests against Israeli apartheid, the Winter Olympics, and the planned G8/G20 meetings in Ontario."

  • OLYMPICS FINANCING AND HOUSING CRISIS SHAPE VANCOUVER ELECTION

    http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=344

    "The Winter Games have been enthusiastically supported by all major municipal and provincial parties, but from the get-go politicians and corporate promoters have had a tough time selling them to a skeptical population across the province of British Columbia"

[Roger Annis is an aerospace worker in Vancouver and an editor of Socialist Voice, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at rogerannis (at) hotmail.com.]

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Tonight's opening of the Winter Olympics is sure to grab headlines and captivate audiences across the world. Unfortunately, the Olympics aren't the only high-stakes competition unfolding right now in Canada.

Seven hundred miles from Vancouver, giant oil corporations, some of them sponsors of the Olympics1, are deploying their machinery in a race to exploit Alberta's tar sands. These companies strip mine huge tracts of the pristine Boreal Forest, the Amazon of the North, to extract the oil beneath. An area of forest the size of Florida is set to be razed and replaced with open pit mines, smoke stacks and toxic ponds.

Big Oil is counting on America's fossil fuel addiction to make this race profitable. The industry wants to build new pipelines to double imports of dirty tar sands oil into the United States. As you read this, the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline sits on President Obama's desk waiting for approval.

This is our opportunity to halt the destruction. Tell President Obama to say "no thanks" to more dirty tar sands oil.

A dirty truth of the tar sands project is that more than natural habitats are being destroyed in the race to extract oil. The toxic byproducts of the mining process are poisoning indigenous communities that rely on the land and water downstream. These communities have seen high rates of rare cancers since the mining began.

The dirty truth behind the Olympics is that they are being fueled by corporations profiting from this tragedy. Sunoco subsidiary Petro Canada runs six tar sands projects and is a National Partner of the Olympics. TransCanada, the official supplier of natural gas for the Games, is driving the Keystone XL pipeline, which would be the biggest pipeline yet to funnel dirty tar sands oil into the United States.

You can help stop Big Oil's race to ruin in the tar sands. Call on President Obama to deny the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

As the curtain opens on the Winter Games in Vancouver tonight, you can help close the curtain on Big Oil's Olympics of destruction unfolding next door.

Sincerely,
Alex Moore
Dirty Fuels Campaigner
Friends of the Earth

NOTE:

1. Petro Canada (Sunoco in the U.S.) runs six tar sands projects and is a National Partner of the Vancouver Olympics. TransCanada is the official supplier of natural gas for these Olympics. In the United States, TransCanada is pushing the Keystone XL pipeline, which aims to carry 900,000 barrels of tar sands oil to the Gulf Coast. The Royal Bank of Canada is another key Olympics sponsor and has invested more money in the tar sands than any other bank.

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By Dave Zirin on 02/09/2010

News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, "With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [British Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games."

Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine.

I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn't going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?"

Then insult on top of injury when they deported Macias and insisted he pay his own way out of the country. "They wanted me to buy a $1,300 plane ticket back to Chicago. I said ‘no way' and now I'm in Seattle."

Martin's story is not unique. Two delegates aiming to attend an indigenous assembly taking place alongside the games were also detained and turned away.

For people with just a passing knowledge of our neighbors to the north, it must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there actually is a long history in Canada of this kind of abuse of power. The latest chapter in that history has been written during the pre-Olympic crackdown of 2010. Now as protestors and independent, unembedded journalists gather for the February 10-15 anti-Olympic convergence, as tax dollars go toward importing snow, the need to silence dissent becomes an International Olympic Committee imperative.

As Chicago's Bob Quellos, who entered Vancouver successfully after accompanying Macias, said to me,  "Walking the streets, residents here are very clear about who is responsible for the billions of dollars of Olympic debt they will be paying off for generations. They are outraged that the over $1 billion that is being spent on security has placed a cop on almost every corner of Downtown Vancouver. And they are outraged by the government's priorities. For example, while Vancouver's Downtown East Side struggles with poverty similar to third-world countries and social programs continue to be gutted, VANOC is spending an untold amount of money helicoptering in snow to the Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain that would otherwise be a mud hill due to the warm weather."

It's not hard to deduce why the snow is melting: it's the heat on the street.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

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Olympic games are always the base on which corporate greed is build. Governments are receiving funds to rebuild the city (i.e .stadiums, streets) but usually half of these money go into government officials.Look at Greece. The Greek government spend millions and millions on the Olympics (I heard that many of the hundreds of server computers,pdas,laptops bought for the Olympic Officials, they were taken by government officials without PAYING!!!! ,... and we literally talk about hundred of them) and now the government financial situation is really bad....So why none of the Greek officials didn't ever though of spending the money spend for The Olympics in order to rebuild the country ?

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At the end of the day, it is all about greed. We live in Atlanta, and Billions of taxpayers dollars were poured into the olympic village. Now it is a wonderful resting place for our homeless. Wasted money!
You watch the skiers and they are a walking billboard! Visa, natures valley, delta on there leg. It is a disgrace it has come to this.

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A massive and dare I say even historic protest movement around the Vancouver Games has, over the past few days, also featured a sharp debate around 'diversity of tactics' and related issues -- this after a Saturday action which featured 'Black Block' attired property destruction. The Hudson's Bay was smashed up, as was TD Bank, and newspaper boxes were knocked over and smashed, etc.

The comment threat in this article in the Georgia Straight (an independent, progressive publication) gives you some hint of the general public's reaction:

http://www.straight.com/article-289546/vancouver/2010-heart-attack-disrupts-vancouver-day-two-winter-olympics

Judy Rebick has written on the debate today:

http://transformingpower.ca/en/blog/breaking-windows-not-revolutionary-act

An anonymously signed 'communique' has been released and picked up by mainstream media, boasting of its signers 'courage' through participation in the 'Black Block''s action:

http://www.straight.com/article-290119/vancouver/black-bloc-releases-statement-2010-heart-attack-and-olympic-violence

Andrew Loewen has written up some of his thoughts on this 'communique', in which he makes some very important points:

http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/2790

As the debate rolls out, it's important to remember that it needs to take place in the context of unity in action around a number of ongoing actions related to the Olympics circus here, including a Tent City protest camp that has been established on a vacant Concord Pacific property which VANOC had been using as a parking lot.